John Coulthart blogged about his designs for the forthcoming Savoy publication Into the Media Web, a collection of Michael Moorcock’s nonfiction work.

Here at last is the book I spent a good part of last year designing. Into the Media Web is a huge volume as befits a huge talent, 720 pages of Michael Moorcock’s non-fiction spanning fifty years of his career from his days writing for sf and fantasy fanzines, through to journalism, reviews and articles for major newspapers and magazines.

This being about design, Coulthart shares some of his inspired work.

It was the cover design which dictated the look of the interior. The book’s title comes from a prescient article of Moorcock’s from the late 1960s concerning the increasingly interrelated nature of modern media. Accompanying this was a small diagram (below) which showed some of the connections Moorcock was discussing.

Inside the book a grey Tube line begins on the half-title page and snakes its way through the entire volume, marked with the names of writers or locations encountered along the way. For the title spread I created an illustration of the author intended to resemble the tile mosaics one finds on the walls of the Underground stations in the city centre. The starting point was a photo from the mid-Seventies which appeared inside the very first Savoy Moorcock book, Sojan in 1977.